A Timeline of Asian American HistoryBy U.S. Immigration Services

Asians first began to immigrate to the U.S. in the mid-19th
century. Since then, they have undergone violent and unjust
discrimination but have also overcome it.
Today, Asian-Americans proudly live as U.S. citizens, with
equal rights and equal contributions to the country.
For more details, please visit U.S. Immigration website, more precisely this page:
http://www.us-immigration.com/asian-american-history-timeline/

10 Facts
You May Not Know About Asian-American History

It's
almost the end of May. Do you know your Asian-American
history?

Most of America isn't aware
that May is
Asian-American Heritage Month. It's a celebration
that started in 1978, when Congress urged President Jimmy
Carter to declare the week of May 4th "Asian-American
Heritage Week." (That date was chosen to coincide with the
arrival of the first Japanese immigrants on May 7, 1843, and
with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad —
built largely by Chinese laborers — on May 10, 1869.) More
recently in 1990, following another vote by Congress,
President George H.W. Bush expanded Asian-American Heritage
Week to encompass the entire month of May.

Sadly, Asian-American
history and heritage is rarely taught in U.S. public
schools. So for those of you who've missed such curriculum,
here's a list of 10 factoids you may not have known about
the history of Asian-Americans in this country:

The first Asians whose
arrival in America was documented
were Filipinos who escaped a Spanish galleon in 1763.
They formed the first Asian-American settlement in U.S.
history, in the swamps surrounding modern-day New
Orleans.

In the years between 1917
and 1965, Uncle Sam explicitly outlawed immigration to
the U.S. of all Asian people. Immigration from China,
for example, was banned as early as 1882, when the Chinese
Exclusion Act was passed. It wasn't until the Immigration
Act of 1965 — which abolished national origins as a
basis for immigration decisions — that nearly 50 years
of race-based discrimination against Asian immigrants
ended.

Because of their race,
Asians immigrants were denied the right to naturalize as
U.S. citizens until the 1943
Magnuson Act was passed. Consequently, for nearly a
century of U.S. history, Asians were barred from owning
land and testifying in court by laws that specifically
targeted "aliens ineligible to citizenship." Even after
the passage of the Fourteenth
Amendment in 1868, American-born children of Chinese
immigrants were not regarded as American citizens until
the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case, United
States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that
the Fourteen Amendment also applied to people of Asian
descent.

Among the earliest
Asian immigrants, virtually all ethnicities worked
together as physical laborers, particularly on Hawaii's
sugar cane plantations. On these plantations, a unique
hybrid language — pidgin — developed that contained
elements of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean and
English. Today,
pidgin is one of the official languages of Hawaii, a
state that is itself 40%
Asian.

Despite the
Alien Land Law, which specifically prevented
Asians from owning their own land,
Japanese farmers were highly successful in the West
Coast where they put into practice their knowledge of
cultivating nutrient-poor soil to yield profitable
harvests. By the 1920s, Japanese farmers (working their
own land, or land held by white landowners that they
managed) were the chief agricultural producers of many
West Coast crops. In fact, the success of Japanese
farmers is often cited as one of the reasons white
landowners in California lobbied to support
Japanese-American internment following the declaration
of World War II.

Many of the early Asian immigrants who worked as
laborers on plantations and in factories were
instrumental in the formation of the American labour
movement, helping to organize some of the first strikes
and unions throughout the country. Japanese plantation
workers, for example,
engaged in the first organized strike in Hawaii in
1904.

Anti-miscegenation laws that denied marriage licenses
between interracial couples specifically prohibited
intermarriage between whites and Asians. For example,
the 1922 Cable
Act revoked the citizenship of any female U.S.
citizen who married an "alien ineligible to
citizenship," a phrase repeatedly used in legal
documents to refer to Asians.

Unlike Irish immigrants, who predominantly entered the
United States via the Ellis Island immigration center,
most Asian immigrants entered America by way of
Angel Island Immigration Station. Unlike at Ellis
Island, where immigrants might spend between two and
five hours waiting to be processed, the Angel Island
facility's unspoken goal was to limit the flow of Asian
immigrants into the country. Between 1910 and 1940, many
prospective Asian immigrants were detained for as long
as two years at Angel Island, stymied by U.S.
immigration officials hoping to find reasons to deport
them. Some of the detainees wrote
poems in Chinese on the walls of the Angel Island
detention facility; these poems have since been
translated and collected into anthologies.

During World War II, Japanese American internees —
including both Japanese immigrants and their American
children — were
forcibly relocated from their homes in the West
Coast to remote relocation camps. Even still, several
young Japanese-American men went on to successfully
lobby the American government to be allowed to volunteer
as soldiers in World War II, often to prove their
loyalty to the United States.
The 442nd infantry regiment, a
segregated Asian-American unit composed almost entirely
of Japanese-Americans, fought in Italy, France and
Germany and is still the most highly decorated regiment
in United States Armed Forces history.

In 1982, a young Chinese-American man named
Vincent Chin was brutally clubbed to death by two
white men in Detroit, Michigan. The crime was motivated,
in part, by anti-Asian sentiment stemming from
widespread loss of auto manufacturing jobs to Japanese
competitors; Ronald Ebens, one of the attackers, was
heard saying "it's because of you little motherfuckers
that we're out of work" to Chin moments before the
attack. Despite pleading guilty to second-degree murder,
Chin's killers did not serve any jail time for Chin's
murder, and were only fined $3,000. Vincent Chin's death
served as a flashpoint that ignited the modern
Asian-American political movement.

Know anyone else who might
benefit from an Asian-American history lesson? Tell your
friends, pass it on — and leave any other key moments you
think I missed in the comments.